Fail Gubaidulin, an engineer-physicist, demonstrates the effect of a Tesla Coil with a lamp that is lit by the electromagnetic field generated by the coil during a performance for schoolchildren at the Museum Centre in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, on Aug. 29. (Reuters/Ilya Naymushin)
For years, people have been puzzling over why there are so few women in science, technology, engineering and math, and why the university professors who teach the subjects are predominantly men. Is it genetics? Preference? Caregiving responsibilities? An unwelcoming environment?

Turns out, according to a new study released Thursday on men in academic science, it may have a lot to do with the boss. The majority of tenured full professors at some of the most prestigious universities in the country, who have the most power to hire and fire and set the workplace expectation of long hours, are men who have either a full-time spouse at home who handles all caregiving and home duties, or a spouse with a part-time or secondary career who takes primary responsibility for the home.

And it’s not just women who are being squeezed out of academic science, the study concludes. It’s also men who want to be more active at home.

About two-thirds of all the men interviewed in depth for the study said they wanted to be more involved at home, or at least present for their spouse and children. Yet only one-third of the men described themselves in egalitarian partnerships. The majority had wives who worked full-time, some in demanding academic careers themselves. And the men said they’d made decisions to cut back or flex their work hours and make career compromises in order to share the load at home.

Fifteen percent of the men interviewed said they planned to forego having children because they saw them as incompatible with a successful career. Other studies have found that academic scientists may have flexible schedules, but they work long hours, at least 55 hours a week. More, if you count the mental labor working out a problem away from the lab.

“Academic science doesn’t just have a gender problem, but a family problem,” said Sarah Damaske, a sociology professor at Penn State and one of the report’s authors. “We came to see that men or women, if they want to have families, are likely to face significant challenges.”

The field remains dominated by men – more than 80 percent of the full professors in life sciences, more than 90 percent of the full professors in mathematics, statistics and physical sciences and more than 95 percent of full professors in engineering.

Screen Shot 2014-09-10 at 10.02.48 PM
Screen Shot 2014-09-10 at 10.03.44 PM
The study, Damaske said, showed there was potential for change, in the majority of men who wanted to take on a more active role at home as fathers. But there was also resistance to change from those in power at the institutions.

“We came to realize that it really benefits your career to have someone at home, making sacrifices for your career,” Damaske said. “The majority of men we spoke to see that. But they’re not happy about it.”

And for the men who have put family first, they talked of feeling isolated from their colleagues and that they’d made career concessions others hadn’t. “I am not nearly as productive as I used to be,” one associate biology professor said. “No academic institution is particularly – that I know of – is particularly great for family … the people that do best in academica, sadly, often are those who don’t’ have [the responsibility] of child care.”

Men who were move involved at home reported greater levels of stress at work. At the same time, they reported being much more satisfied with their home lives.

Damaske said age didn’t play a role in their findings. Some men in egalitarian partnerships were well into their 60s. And some graduate students in their 20s had traditional marriages or planned not to have children in order to dedicate their lives to their careers.

“We did find that men in traditional marriages were more likely to be full professors and in positions of power,” she said, “and to reach those positions of power at a younger age than men in other marital arrangements.”

Elaine Howard Ecklund, another report author and a sociology professor at Rice University, said that they undertook the study because most research on work-family conflicts study women, or differences between men and women. “Yet, academic science remains dominated by men,” she said, “so we need to know if they deal with the same issues balancing work and family life as do women.”

And from the comments in the study, it’s clear that a majority of academic scientists in powerful positions do not. Academic science is portrayed as an all-consuming field:

“Well, I would think that if we had more hours in the day that weren’t taken up, we might have had kids.” – a 64-year-old physics professor, married, no kids.
“Women are burdened with childrearing. So, that really sets your career path.” – faculty member married to a physician in a neotraditional marriage.
“I never in my life made a tax return. I never in my life washed a pair of socks or cleaned a pair of shoes,” said one 67-year-old physics professor in a traditional marriage. When asked if having children is difficult to manage with being a scientist, he responded: “No, absolutely not. That’s why you have a wife.”
Men in traditional marriages rising to power faster, becoming boss and setting the tone for workplace expectations is a phenomenon seen in other fields. In a series of studies of more than 700 married men, researchers at Harvard, New York University and the University of Utah found that men in traditional marriages tended to hold positions of power in business and other organizations.

That study found these bosses tended to think that workplaces with more women didn’t operate well, and more frequently denied female employees opportunities for promotion, considering them less qualified than men even when their resumes were identical. The researchers dubbed these men “resistors” to change.

The study on academic male scientists also calls to mind the story of Carol Greider. When she got the news that she’d won the Nobel Prize in medicine a few years ago, she was folding laundry. A subsequent 2010 study found that partnered women scientists tended to do 54 percent of the cooking, cleaning and laundry in their households, while partnered male scientists carried just 28 percent of the load.

The study, now online, is slated for print in November in the journal Work and Occupations. It was funded in part by the National Science Foundation, Rice University and the Population Research Institute of Penn State.

APS Fellow Ed Diener and his wife Carol Diener want you to imagine taking chapters from various introductory textbooks, then shuffling them in any order you want to best fit the course you are teaching — all within minutes on a computer. Oh, and the book is free to your students. Chapters can also be used as supplementary readings, free of charge.
This is precisely the model that the Dieners are proposing for psychology education. Professors of psychology emeriti at the University of Illinois, the couple has founded the Diener Education Fund, a non-profit organization with the mission of re-inventing higher education to serve the changing needs of students and professors. Through that organization, they have created the Noba project, a free website that contains textbooks and related resources.
Ed Diener, founding editor of the APS journal Perspectives on Psychological Science and recipient of the association’s William James Lifetime Achievement Award, says one key advantage of Noba is the ease and speed with which online textbooks can be updated. But he adds that the site also is designed to make learning materials more affordable for students across the globe.“Our e-text is part of a movement to help educate more people at a lower cost, and we are hoping professors will join this movement,” he said. “Electronic books are also undoubtedly the wave of the future.”
In this month’s Academic Observer, Henry L. Roediger, III, talks to Ed and Carol Diener about the Noba project.
In his extensive research on happiness and subjective well-being, Ed Diener understands well the needs of the disadvantaged. His studies have included some of the world’s most impoverished people, including groups such as the homeless and those living in slums.
Carol Diener has a strong record of training undergraduate and graduate students, working with them to provide counseling, special education, data collection, and other services to community agencies that work with young people. A clinical psychologist and attorney, she directed UI’s Mental Health Worker program and created three community outreach programs.
The Noba project has given the Dieners the chance to to work with their son, Robert Biswas-Diener, one of three of their five children to follow their steps in psychology education. Biswas-Diener, who runs an Oregon-based consulting organization that provides coaching and training in applied positive psychology, serves as managing editor of the site.
The Diener Education Fund has supported the creation of several textbooks for Noba, but the organization is considering several ways to make the website self-sustaining — including the possible help of charitable foundations.
The site currently contains a variety of introductory textbooks on topics ranging from the biological basis of behavior to sensation and perception. Texts are written by psychological scientists rather than generalists, so that the materials are “much more likely to have the facts straight,” Diener says. At the same time, the editors try to insure that the materials are accessible to beginning students and not written in jargon. Additional textbooks and instructor resources are in development.
Noba will also feature multimedia learning aids. In fact, the Diener Fund has launched a new competition for the best student-produced educational YouTube presentations. The submissions can be no longer than 3 minutes in length, are due May 1, 2014, and can be submitted by individuals or teams at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The focus of the first round of awards, to be announced in June, is on memory and learning, although the entrants can extend those concepts to other areas of psychology (e.g., clinical, social, neuroscience). Noba will award $6,000 for the top honor, $3,000 for second place, and $1,000 for third place. Details are available at nobaproject.com/student-video-award. The Dieners hope to stimulate more active learning exercises with future award programs for both students and faculty.
Observer Vol.27, No.2 February, 2014

My name is Adam Grant, and I am an INTJ. That’s what I learned from a wildly popular personality test, which is taken by more than 2.5 million people a year, and used by 89 of the Fortune 100 companies. It’s called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), and my score means that I’m more introverted than extraverted, intuiting than sensing, thinking than feeling, and judging than perceiving. As I reflected on the results, I experienced flashes of insight. Although I spend much of my time teaching and speaking on stage, I am more of an introvert—I’ve always preferred a good book to a wild party. And I have occasionally kept lists of my to-do lists.

But when I took the test a few months later, I was an ESFP. Suddenly, I had become the life of the party, the guy who follows his heart and throws caution to the wind. Had my personality changed, or is this test not all it’s cracked up to be? I began to read through the evidence, and I found that the MBTI is about as useful as a polygraph for detecting lies. One researcher even called it an “act of irresponsible armchair philosophy.” When it comes to accuracy, if you put a horoscope on one end and a heart monitor on the other, the MBTI falls about halfway in between.

Now, if you’re an MBTI fan, you might say it’s typical of an INTJ to turn to science. Touche. But regardless of your type, it’s hard to argue with the idea that if we’re going to divide people into categories, those categories ought to be meaningful. In social science, we use four standards: are the categories reliable, valid, independent, and comprehensive? For the MBTI, the evidence says not very, no, no, and not really.

1. I’m Not Schizophrenic

A test is reliable if it produces the same results from different sources. If you think your leg is broken, you can be more confident when two different radiologists diagnose a fracture. In personality testing, reliability means getting consistent results over time, or similar scores when rated by multiple people who know me well. As my inconsistent scores foreshadowed, the MBTI does poorly on reliability. Research shows “that as many as three-quarters of test takers achieve a different personality type when tested again,” writes Annie Murphy Paul in The Cult of Personality Testing, “and the sixteen distinctive types described by the Myers-Briggs have no scientific basis whatsoever.” In a recent article, Roman Krznaric adds that “if you retake the test after only a five-week gap, there’s around a 50% chance that you will fall into a different personality category.”

2. Objects in This Mirror May Be Less Accurate Than They Appear

A test is valid if it predicts outcomes that matter. If we’re going to use it in organizations, it should shed light on how well I’ll perform in a particular job or with a certain group of people. Although there are data suggesting that different occupations attract people of different types, there is no convincing body of evidence that types affect job performance or team effectiveness. As management researchers William Gardner and Mark Martinko write in a comprehensive review, “Few consistent relationships between type and managerial effectiveness have been found.”

3. Apples and Oranges are Both Fruit, and So is a Tomato—But a Potato Isn’t

Categories are mutually exclusive if they capture different traits that are separate, and combine traits that have commonalities. Here, too, the MBTI misses the mark. Let me illustrate with two (of many) examples:

Exhibit A: in the MBTI, thinking and feeling are opposite poles of a continuum. In reality, they’re independent: we have three decades of evidence that if you like ideas and data, you can also like people and emotions. (In fact, more often than not, they go hand in hand: research shows that people with stronger thinking and reasoning skills are also better at recognizing, understanding, and managing emotions.) When I scored as a thinker one time and a feeler one time, it’s because I like both thinking and feeling. I should have separate scores for the two.
Exhibit B: the feeling type is supposed to tap into my orientation toward people and emotions. But this lumps together three separate traits that capture a positive orientation toward others, the tendency to feel negative emotions, and the receptivity toward these emotions.
4. A Physical Exam That Ignores Your Torso and One of Your Arms

A comprehensive test assesses the major categories that exist. One of the key elements missing from the MBTI is what personality psychologists call emotional stability versus reactivity—the tendency to stay calm and collected under stress or pressure. This turns out to be one of the most important predictors of individual and group patterns of thought, feeling, and action, so it’s an unfortunate oversight. As another example, the judging-perceiving scale captures whether I’m an organizer and a planner, but overlooks the industriousness and achievement drive that tend to accompany these characteristics—together, they form a personality trait called conscientiousness. As personality psychologists Robert McCrae and Paul Costa sum it up, “the MBTI does not give comprehensive information on the four domains it does sample.”

Even introversion-extraversion, the trait the MBTI captured best, is incomplete. According to the MBTI, extraversion is about where you get your energy: from the outside world or the inner world. This is partially right, but it’s not because of a preference for interacting with people. Our scores are heavily shaped by how our brains process neocortical arousal. As Susan Cain explains in Quiet, “more than a thousand studies conducted by scientists worldwide” suggest that introverts “are more sensitive than extroverts to various kinds of stimulation, from coffee to a loud bang to the dull roar of a networking event.” Besides, it turns out that like all personality traits, introversion-extraversion is shaped like a bell curve: it’s most common to be in the middle. The vast majority of us are ambiverts: in Dan Pink’s words from To Sell is Human, most people are“neither overly extraverted nor wildly introverted.”

Caught in a Bad Romance

Why does the MBTI remain so popular in spite of these problems? Murphy Paul argues that people cling to the test for two major reasons. One is that thousands of people have invested time and money in becoming MBTI-certified trainers and coaches. As I wrote over the summer, it’s awfully hard to let go of our big commitments. The other is the “aha” moment that people experience when the test gives them insight about others—and especially themselves. “Those who love type,” Murphy Paul writes, “have been seduced by an image of their own ideal self.” Once that occurs, personality psychologist Brian Little says, raising doubts about “reliability and validity is like commenting on the tastiness of communion wine. Or how good a yarmulke is at protecting your head.”

Palm readings and horoscopes can spark insights too. That doesn’t mean we should talk about them in our work teams. As Little observes, “Insight from the Myers-Briggs can start that conversation, but unfortunately it often ends the conversation. You’ve got your type stamped on your forehead.”

In a Washington Post article, Does it pay to know your type? Lillian Cunningham asks whether we can send the MBTI back to the factory for some refurbishing. The response from Little: “It’s a little bit like taking a Dodge Caravan and trying to turn it into a Rolls Royce.” Instead, psychologists have spent the past half century building a better car from scratch, using the scientific method. That car is called the Big Five personality traits, and it meets the standards above. Across many of the world’s cultures, five personality traits consistently emerge: extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness. The Big Five traits have high reliability and considerable power in predicting job performance and team effectiveness. They even have genetic and biological bases, and researchers in the emerging field of personality neuroscience have begun mapping the Big Five to relevant brain regions.

The Big Five are far from perfect, and there’s growing support for a HEXACO model of personality that adds a sixth trait: honesty-humility. Right now, though, the biggest problem facing the Big Five is one of marketing. Most people prefer to be called agreeable than disagreeable—we need to repackage this trait as supportive versus challenging. I hope some of you will take up the challenge.

Until then, we all need to recognize that four letters don’t do justice to anyone’s identity. So leaders, consultants, counselors, coaches, and teachers, join me in delivering this message:

MBTI, I’m breaking up with you. It’s not me. It’s you.

For a follow-up post, see MBTI, If You Want Me Back, You Need to Change Too

Adam is an organizational psychologist and the author of Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. Follow him here by clicking the yellow FOLLOW above and on Twitter @AdamMGrant